1. Description of the Related Art
The workflow for creating a comic page is typically divided into the following stages: pencils, inks, colors, and letters. However, before any of this final artwork can be produced, the artist has to go through a planning stage, doing a lot of rough work to define how the page will look. For many comic creators, a large chunk of this planning work involves creating thumbnails. These are rough, simplified versions of the panels on a page. The artist may draw many different thumbnails for a single page, experimenting with layout, framing, timing, and other variables until the flow of the page feels right.
There are conventional digital comic creation tools that are designed for causal users, and as such generally provide predefined templates of fixed panels into which users can copy bitmap images (e.g., digital photos) and add filters and text to, for example, quickly turn a photo album into a comic. However, these tools are generally not well suited for the creation of original, sketch-based comics by more sophisticated comic artists.
Many or most comic artists currently use pencil and paper for early-stage comic planning work. However, while these might currently be the tools of choice for comic planning, pencil and paper have their own problems. Making small edits often requires starting over from scratch, which makes it difficult to experiment with different design alternatives. Sketchbooks become a mess of scribbles and erasures; some artists talk about redrawing the same page dozens of times until it feels right.
There are a number of conventional digital sketching applications available for various computing platforms including tablet-type computing devices. These conventional digital sketching applications generally support freehand drawing and erasing. However, these conventional digital sketching applications are general-purpose sketching tools that treat the device as really nothing more than a digital piece of paper.
2. Touch and multitouch technologies
Conventional touch-enabled technologies (e.g. a computer touchpad, ATM screen, etc) recognize only one touch point. Multitouch is a technology that provides hardware and software that allows computer users to control various applications via the manipulation of multiple digits on the surface of (or, for some devices, proximate to) a multitouch-enabled device. Multitouch technology generally consists of a touch-enabled device (referred to as a multitouch device) such as a touch-sensitive display device (computer display, screen, table, wall, etc.), touchpad, tablet, smartphone, etc., as well as software that recognizes multiple, substantially simultaneous touch points on the surface of the multitouch device. A multitouch device may be a direct or absolute touch device in which the touch points are applied directly to a display device, or an indirect or relative touch device in which the touch points are applied to a pad or tablet and mapped to a display device.